Abstract
We cannot carry on with the same approach to solving global systemic problems of persisting poverty and inequality of power, and accelerating climate change. The prevalent siloed approach of solving complex systemic problems by breaking them into parts and then trying to improve the parts separately with specialized expertise and resourced dedicated to each part, will not solve these problems. In fact, it is making them worse. A new “systems” approach is necessary based on local systems solutions cooperatively developed and implemented by communities to their integrated social, economic, environmental, and political problems. Global providers of expertise and assistance must respect the wisdom within local communities much more than they do, and within them of older persons, especially older women. They must learn to listen deeply to “people not like themselves”.
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On an early November morning this year, I was standing in the hills of “Switzerland in Africa”, in Rwanda, a few miles from the center of its capital city, Kigali. My colleagues and I, trustees of HelpAge International, were driven from the modern, steel and glass, hotel in Kigali in which we stayed, through the spotlessly clean streets of Kigali—which looked like a European town except that all the people were black.
We had driven off the black-top road, a few miles out of town, onto a dirt road through the hills, alongside a ditch behind which was a tall hedge, beyond which was a tiny field of amaranth plants, on the edge of which I was standing with my colleagues and our local partners who translated for us. In that tiny field, about twenty women, all over sixty, were weeding their crop. Amongst them was a 96-year-old woman leaning on her stick. HelpAge International is devoted to enabling older persons to live well. This year we were focusing on the theme “Older Women in Crisis”. Women live longer than men. Women provide care to others in their families through their lives. Sadly, when they are older, and often alone, no one seems to care for them.
1. The women in the field
The women in the field were part of a self-help cooperative. They pooled tiny amounts of money into a common fund, from which they loaned or gifted money to any of themselves in distress. They met once a week to manage their fund, and to bond socially. One third of the women were widows. They said, what they valued the most in their collective was the opportunity they had to meet others. Because in their society, widows are neglected, even shunned. Social isolation of widows and neglect of older women is a social problem in many “developing” countries in Africa and Asia. Formations of women self-help groups is a common solution too in many of these countries.
The women in this group were not only managing a small mutual fund, and meeting weekly, they were also working together in the field to supplement their incomes. Amaranth is a valuable staple in the Rwandan diet. They had rented their land from a local landowner, an old man in patched trousers and a straw hat, who was standing on the side. They converted their labor into a saleable crop, paid him rent, and hoped to get a good price in the local market to supplement their incomes. Their cooperative was a “social enterprise” providing economic benefits. Or an “economic enterprise” with a social purpose, whichever way one wants to look at it. They were happy with its social benefits. But they were getting very little income from it.
2. The women in the “factory”
We drove on to a little town in which sixty women were assembled in a large community hall which the local administration had provided them for their meetings. In it, women were producing items for sale: table linen with crochet, and baskets from bamboo strips. In a corner, a group of women was also busy producing liquid soap for sale.
The old women producing soap proudly explained the science of their process. They also knew the English names of all their ingredients and why they had to be mixed at a certain temperature, and how long they had to be stirred to get the composition of their product right. They said they were taught these skills by another NGO who was promoting “skill development” for enabling needy people to earn more. They said they had pooled their savings to buy their ingredients from the market. When asked what price they expected for their product, they were not sure. And when asked, who would buy it, they said that someone would because there was increasing demand for liquid soap in hotels and restaurants, the NGO had said.
Women have always been at work in all societies, West and East, North and South, producing and serving others, for which they are paid very little or nothing at all. Renting land for cultivation is a centuries old practice in all societies, and very often it is women who do the cultivating. Therefore, economists who demand that more women should be in the “out of home workforce” (as they are saying in India), to grow the GDP, and to improve the lives of women too, are not seeing the realities. In Bangladesh, whose garment industry is an important supplier to global retailers, millions of women leave home to labor long hours, in poor working conditions and unsafe factories, for which they are paid very little. Violent strikes have broken out in Bangladesh this month, with women demanding fair, and much higher wages. 150 factories have been forced shut and 1100 workers (mostly women) charged with breaking the law. The power of owners versus laborers on the land, and in factories, whether men or women, has always been unequal.
The soap-making enterprise in Rwanda was a “social” enterprise with an economic purpose. Its economic success was dependent entirely on the “market”. The price the women would obtain for their product, whenever they could sell it, would be determined by some “invisible hand”. They would be powerless to negotiate with it.
Socio-economic-power systems are complex systems. Those who promote social enterprises, as well as those who do “social” work in general, must understand the forces in complex systems and where power lies in them. Otherwise, their well-intentioned efforts will have limited impact, and will not be sustainable. They may even back-fire, as I fear the intervention to provide “skills” to women to earn more, investing their own money, might. They would lose the savings they had so hopefully invested in their business enterprise.
3. The old woman with eleven goats
We drove on in the bus, on another dirt road up into the hills, past more fields with women working in them, to see an old woman to whom an NGO had donated one goat and taught her how to care for it and to breed more goats. Now she had eleven.
There she was, leaning on her stick, with many goats around her eating from bundles of green grass that was strewn for them. We could count only nine. Where were the other two? She pointed behind us, where two little goat-kids were frolicking, and four small children, four to nine years old, were sitting against the wall of her mud and paint house, their game with a tattered tennis ball interrupted by our visit.
We asked her, who the children were? Her grandchildren, she said. Her children were living in the town to earn money. Her two older grandchildren were with them in school. Do these four children go to school, we asked? She said, they could, because the government school was free. However, she needed them at home to take care of the goats and help her with other chores.
The udder of one of the goats was very full. I asked her what she did with the milk. Our local partner was surprised. “Do goats produce milk to drink?” she asked. I remembered the story of Gandhiji who insisted on drinking only goat milk because it was easier for him to digest than cow’s milk. I replied that goats do produce valuable milk for humans. She said that the breed of goat the old woman had been given (by an international NGO) was designed for producing more meat.
I asked the old woman whether her grandchildren got to eat any goat meat to supplement the local greens and grains from the fields which was their diet she had said. She said, she could not afford to give the meat to them. She needed to sell all of it to make money. Who did she sell the meat to? I asked. Butchers came from the town, she said. (I wondered about the price they charged their customers in the town and the price they paid her.)
The grandmother’s economic circumstances were improved by the multiplication of her goats. However, more goats needed more grandchildren to care for them. And the children were not being sent to school even though free schooling was available for them. They might be under-nourished too. Clearly, the solution for the older woman by an organization dedicated to the cause of elders alone was not a good solution for all generations.
Encouraging poor people to use their labor to grow more food for the market to earn more money, by diverting their labor and land from growing more food for themselves, leaves them to the vagaries of markets. Producers at the bottom of food chains suffer the most in inflations and recessions. Producers, who must live and work on the land in rural areas, are prevented from increasing their prices to reduce inflationary effects for consumers in towns and cities, who are a more powerful, visible, and volatile, political constituency.
The prevalent development paradigm must be changed. Solutions in silos do not improve the well-being of all. Economic solutions cannot be separated from social solutions. And education schemes for the poor should not be separated from schemes for improving their livelihoods. Nor should livelihood solutions for farmers be separated from solutions for malnutrition. Or schemes for rural uplift from schemes for urban improvement. Solutions for one generation (or any part of a system), must be viewed through a systems’ lens, to understand what impacts a good solution for any generation (or solutions by experts for one part of a system), can have on other generations and on parts of the system.
4. Older women and climate change
Every summer since the new millennium the tiny village of Tallberg on the shores of Lake Siljan in central Sweden hosted an assembly of 300 persons from around the world. Their concern for the harm economic progress is causing nature brought them together. They imagined the contours of a new, environmentally sustainable paradigm. Videos of polar bears on melting icebergs were shown at the opening to raise consciousness of climate change. The King of Sweden was invited to open the discussions. Participants from other continents were also invited to speak at the opening.
One was a poet from Nigeria who had just about made it in time for the opening, travelling a long distance after she could get a visa to travel to Sweden. She thanked the organizers for inviting her, and she recounted her conversation with her old, widowed aunt in Nigeria when she told her aunt she was travelling to Sweden to discuss climate change.
Her aunt asked her to explain what climate change was. She explained that changes in the earth’s temperature were affecting its hydrological system. Icepacks were melting; rivers were drying; floods were increasing and droughts too. “Oh, is that what it is? I have known it for many years,” the aunt said. “The ponds in the village have been drying; there are fewer fish in the river; and I have been having a harder time finding clean water nearby”.
“You don’t need to show my aunt a picture of polar bears on icebergs,” the poet said. She has never seen a polar bear or an iceberg. But she knows there is an ecological problem. Her concern is not your concern about what may happen to polar bears in the future. Her concern is what is happening to her here and now. During the week, climate scientists explained their calculation of the further increase in global temperatures that could be tolerated. They explained that the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was the cause of global warming. They said new technologies must be developed to decarbonize the economy before the middle of the century.
The deliberations in Tallberg veered towards the solutions the scientists proposed. Questions the poet from Nigeria had raised at the opening did not receive as much consideration. What would happen during the transition to the new paradigm to people like her aunt in poorer countries? What were they expected to sacrifice in their frugal lifestyles to contribute to the global carbon reduction targets? Would their lives become even more precarious?
“Back to nature” was a theme that united many at Tallberg. Treks through the woods were arranged with meditations under trees. Organic farming was one of the down-to-earth solutions proposed alongside technological solutions for plastic recycling and renewable energies. Organically grown coffee and fruits imported from South America and Asia were offered to delegates by Swedish NGOs. They were certified free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides and packaged in degradable materials.
Scientists were sceptical about such solutions. They pointed out the total impact on the climate of such “feel good” solutions. The climate impacts of energy used in refrigeration and air transport to bring natural produce from farmers in other continents were much higher than the impacts of less expensive, mass-produced foods already available in European supermarkets.
Long supply chains need more energy for the transportation and preservation of goods. They create more stress for the global climate commons without adding to the intrinsic value of the goods they carry. What the world needs is not, longer supply chains connecting consumers in one part of the world with distant producers on the other side; it needs denser local economic webs.
Since the Scientific Enlightenment in Europe in the seventeenth century, science has advanced by breaking the knowledge of reality into components. Greater expertise requires more specialisation. Thus, science has advanced with specialists who know more and more about less and less. The rise of global temperatures has become alarming. It is one more problem for which a solution is required urgently, while the other problems—of poverty and inequitable economic growth, social conflicts, and geo-politics, also require urgent attention. Climate science has become one more scientific silo with its experts, alongside the silos of economics, social sciences, and political science, each with their experts and pundits.
Global systemic problems are unsolvable by scientists in silos who cannot see the whole system. So-called “uneducated” people living in their communities and nature have a better understanding of how socio-economic-environmental systems work. They have a “systems wisdom” which experts in separate sciences lack. Therefore, scientific experts must listen to them rather than imposing non-systemic solutions on them.
5. Older women and men are underutilised social assets, not economic burdens
Globally, the population aged 65 and over is growing faster than other age groups. Life spans are increasing with better healthcare, nutrition, and sanitation. In 2018, for the first time in history, people aged 65 or above outnumbered children. Children are our future, no doubt. However, the changing shape of populations threatens to bankrupt economies. How will fewer young people provide for the care of larger numbers of older persons if the latter no longer contribute to communities?
When the president of Zanzibar received me as the Chairman of HelpAge International in 2017, he posed his dilemma to me. The rights of older people are enshrined in Zanzibar’s constitution. It directs the government to set aside money to maintain a good home for older people. He wanted me to see the well-equipped home the government ran. The problem was it was under-used because older people would rather stay with their families.
Later, the minister for social development and the president of the Older Persons’ Association explained the President’s dilemma. Both were grandparents who enjoyed being with their grandchildren, and their families also liked having them around. Grandparents kept an eye on the house and the children when the parents went to work. The arrangement was good for the economy, and for society too, they felt.
I asked what help they wanted from HelpAge International. The minister asked, could we convince international aid agencies that the Zanzibar solution was the best one for older people in Zanzibar, and not keep driving the government to set aside more money for facilities to put away older people?
“No place like home” is the heading of an account in the Economist, which revealed a pattern the covid pandemic has revealed. In many rich countries, nearly half of all deaths from covid happened in care and nursing homes, even though less than 1 per cent of people live in them. Countries with fewer care homes have had fewer covid deaths, all else being equal.
Older people want to add more life to their years, not more years to their life.As well as exposing fragile business models, the pandemic has highlighted the tension between keeping old people safe and keeping them well. “People should be the boss of their own lives. It is better to live in a house than a warehouse,” says Bill Thomas, the American geriatrician who founded the Green House movement for the care of older persons.
All things must be considered before prescribing strong medicines. Indeed, that’s why scientists were so careful about testing new medicines for covid before releasing them for public use. The pandemic revealed many factors that contribute to human well-being. Lockdowns — a strong medicine to prevent covid deaths — have harmed human well-being in many ways, by other medical problems that could not be attended to, and even by starvation in poorer countries due to disruptions of the economy. In India, as elsewhere, attention was focused every day during the pandemic on counting the deaths caused by covid. The other tragedies, though not counted, were visible in heart-rending images of migrants struggling to find succour, and people denied healthcare for other diseases.
What we have learned from the pandemic is that local systems solutions, developed and implemented by communities, are necessary to solve complex problems. Communities understand their needs and their capabilities better than experts, who are distant from them. Collaboration on the ground has enabled many communities to prevent the spread of the pandemic, as well as taken care of other needs of their members. In India, Kerala, with its systems of local, collaborative action, seems to have done much better than other states. Internationally, countries with strong local systems have done better.
Vietnam seems to have survived the pandemic better than most countries. One reason is the strength of the OPA (Older Persons’ Associations) movement which the government has supported for many years. OPAs operate in all districts of the country. They are adding younger members and transforming themselves into Inter-Generational Self-Help Groups. They take responsibility for the most vulnerable people in their communities — most of whom are older people. They also work with local officials to improve local services and infrastructure for the benefit of the whole community. They are “nodes” in networks of actors who know what is required and who can, working together, improve services for everyone. The older members of these groups are proving to be valuable assets for the community. Moreover, because they are active and they feel valued, they add more good life to their remaining years.
Older people have an invaluable role to play in our collective future. They are “Older, Not Over” as HelpAge International is asking the world to see. We must keep older people engaged, not shut them out to protect their bodies from viruses. Unfortunately, the generic medicine of “physical distancing” to fight the covid pandemic was branded as “social distancing”. The pandemic taught us, on the other hand, that we need “social cohesion”, not “social distancing”, to improve human well-being.
Listening to People Not Like Us
Back in Rwanda. When we finished our inquiries of the women farmers in their little field of amaranth nestled in the beautiful Rwanda hills, one of us produced a box of chocolates to give them and whispered amongst ourselves about who would give it to whom. Standing on the side, where I could see both groups, visitors and natives, I noticed some farmers at the back of their group searching for the best shoots of amaranth and tying them with long leaves of grass. They had noticed that they would be given a gift, and they were preparing their gift in return.
We produced our box of chocolates for them. They were delighted, and then they offered many bundles of amaranth as gifts to us. We hesitated to accept them. How could we accept something from these poor women? And what we do with a few stalks of amaranth, which we did not value, but they did?
The translator at my side, who had been observing the women at the back preparing their gifts and handing them to the woman in the front to give us, intervened. “You must accept their gift. It is a matter of dignity for them”, she said.
That exchange brought out the invisible attitudes and power structures in programs of international development and charity. The “givers” are kind-hearted benefactors. The “beneficiaries” of their advice and charity, are poorer than them, and considered as less knowledgeable too. Since “we” are better than “them”, we must assist them to develop themselves and become like us and then they will be better off.
The expression “the white man’s burden” came to my mind as I watched the exchange of gifts between the black women farmers and the white people on our side. Biases are hidden in our language. “White” is pure; “black” is bad. Our goal is the “North” star. When things are going badly, they are going “South”.
What I was seeing in Africa, in these resilient black women, was that black can be even more beautiful than white, and there is much wisdom the North needs to learn from the South.
It often takes a child to expose the emperor and tell him the fancy clothes he thinks he is wearing are flim-flam. My seven-year-old grandson observed the poverty in India when he was visiting from the US one summer. Poverty is more visible in Delhi, India’s capital city, than in Kigali in the heart of Africa. I brought him to the offices of the Planning Commission, of which I was a member then, and tried to explain to him how we were going about ensuring that there will be no poor people in India. I showed him our reports and plans with masses of data to prove that we knew what we were doing.
Clearly, he was not impressed. Back in school in the US, he was asked to write, like all others in his class, about what he had done in his summer holidays. He chose to write a 14-page book on the Planning Commission of India, with hand-drawn illustrations. At the end, he summarised his view. On the top of the page was a picture of a man behind a big table (perhaps his grandfather). Across the table, a thin stick figure was standing before him with folded hands.
Beneath the picture, he had written. “The Planning Community of India is a place where all the poor people of India can come, and there will be someone there to listen to them. And then they will not be poor anymore.”
His child’s mind could not understand the concept of a “commission”, but it understood the concept of a “community”. His statement about what this community should be—"a place where there will be someone to listen to them”—revealed the need to change the relationships between planners and people and experts and beneficiaries.
How do people become less poor when someone powerful listens to them? It restores their dignity. They are considered worthy of being listened to seriously because their point-view matters.
Travelling to learn from communities in India, I have noticed that they always end our meetings with thanking me (and others who I go with) for coming so far to listen to them. They mean it genuinely. Often, they will produce a gift, of whatever they are producing—some handicraft, a bottle of organic honey, or a box of local produce. I have learned to accept it graciously as an acknowledgement of the worth of their skills and who they are.
They don’t expect a material gift in return. The gift they want is an acknowledgement of the worth of the wisdom and insights we may have learned from them. What they expect in return is that we will take seriously what we have learned from them and change how we are going about assisting them, because we have more power and resources than they have. They hope we will change how we are using our power and resources, because unless we change, their lives will not be improved faster, and they will continue to be the beneficiaries of our charity. We will remain powerful, and inequality will remain.
Arun Maira
12th November 2023